SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS
Madeleine Wickham
Thomas Dunne Books
Fiction
ISBN: 9780312383428
Chloe is just about ready to pull her hair out, so her family's Spanish vacation is coming at a perfect time. She, her partner Philip, and her two kids, Sam and Nat, desperately need the time away, so she's thankful that her old friend Gerard has offered them his villa. All of a sudden a little unsettled about the fact that she and Philip have been together for years but never gotten married, Chloe wants to use the trip to figure out what their relationship means. Philip needs to stop worrying about work and just relax, but it's hard knowing that your bank has just been bought out by a bigger company and no one knows yet who will be fired.
Hugh Stratton is looking for the chance to finally get to know his two young daughters, Octavia and Beatrice. He needs a break from his busy job at a large conglomerate bank. His wife, Amanda, just needs to calm down and de-stress. She feels like a single mother and is quite the control freak, keeping tabs on the staff remodeling her house while they're gone. She's even hired a nanny, Jenna, to watch the girls so that she and Hugh can have some quality time alone.
The Strattons have just managed to find the villa and settle down and relax when strangers drive up to the door, claiming that it's their villa. It could be a simple mistake, except they all know Gerard. They decide that the only thing to do is to try to fit all nine of them in the house. It's big enough, physically, but it can barely contain all of the personalities inside.
It wouldn't be all that awful to share a vacation with another family, except no one knows that Chloe and Hugh have a history together. As they're grappling with what being back together means, Chloe's 16-year-old son Sam is smitten with Jenna, whose attempts at relaxing everyone ("Stocking up on the old cigarettes and booze. Joke!") just makes them even more tense. Then another connection between the two families surfaces --- this time between the men. Both families are more and more annoyed, and the couples are oblivious to the kids and Jenna learning that maybe this wasn't a mistake after all.
SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS is an entertaining romp akin to any comedy of manners. If Shakespeare lived now and dealt with children, nannies, vacations and layoffs, he'd be proud. There's just enough comedy and romance to make this book about a vacation a perfect vacation read. Or beach read. Or weekend read. Wickham, who also writes as Sophie Kinsella, is an old pro at comedic tales that surpass the normal boundaries of chick lit. The story and its characters are lovable and dimensional. Everyone in it is grounded and human, and no one walks into the story with a Cinderella life that can't be explained. These are all people with complicated histories, which do even more for the relationships they have and develop with the others.
Love and marriage, sang Frank Sinatra, go together like a horse and carriage. But it's much more complicated than that, says Wickham. Her novel shows us the many nuances that come with any long-lasting, functional relationship. Still a quick enough read, SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS will leave any reader satisfied.
--- Reviewed by Sarah Hannah Gómez (hannahgomez@gmail.com)
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